Well Read Column by Robert Weibezahl

Most collections of literary letters are published posthumously and, more often than not, include just the one-sided narrative of a single writer. So, Here and Now: Letters, 2008-2011 is doubly notable: a three-year correspondence between two living writers—Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee and acclaimed American novelist Paul Auster. Soon after the two men met in 2008, Coetzee proposed that...

Posted by Cat on November 14, 2012

Here and Now: Letters 2008-2011 by Paul Auster &amp; J.M. CoetzeeViking • $27.95 • ISBN 9780670026661On sale March 11, 2013If you truly want to know an author intimately, you must read their letters. For example, if you want to discover the man behind Slaughterhouse-Five, you read Vonnegut's Letters, featured in our November Well Read column. I especially love when two writers find mutual...

Looking into memory's mirror

In January 2011, a month before he turned 64, Paul Auster began working on Winter Journal, his remarkable meditation on “what it has felt like to live inside this body from the first day you can remember being alive until this one.” Notice his use of the second person? One of the first pleasures of Winter Journal is its feeling of immediacy, as if we are inside Auster’s head...

Posted by Cat on May 16, 2012

Winter Journal by Paul AusterHolt • $26 • ISBN 9780805095531on sale August 21, 2012Thirty years after his breakthrough debut, the memoir The Invention of Solitude,Paul Auster returns to the medium in Winter Journal.With the hindsight of Didion, the narrative elegance of Nabokov and the mesmerizing writing for which he himself is known, Auster (now 65) steps into what he calls "the winter of...

Exploring the sacred relics of the mind

Paul Auster, with his characteristically masterful postmodern experimentation, once again proves himself equally adept at character development and emotional depth. His 16th novel, which follows a group of young squatters seeking refuge from the harsh demands on their generation, is both touching and timely—and showcases the unlikely adaptability of a much-pigeonholed writer.While...

Night and the imagination

Elderly book critic August Brill lies awake, tortured by insomnia in "another white night in the great American wilderness." He has moved into the Vermont home of his divorced daughter, Miriam, to recuperate from injuries suffered in an automobile accident, and is joined there by his granddaughter, Katya, who's struggling to recover from the death of her onetime boyfriend Titus...

Book Clubs Column by Julie Hale

The narrator of Auster's new novel is divorced 59-year-old Nathan Glass, a former life insurance agent who moves to Brooklyn after being treated for lung cancer. With his move comes the decision to take up writing, and Nathan soon embarks on a work called The Book of Human Folly, which he envisions as a narrative about his own life, with a special focus on bad decisions, foul-ups and regrets....

Audio Column by Sukey Howard

These days, most serious novels claim redemption as key to the narrative's resolution, yet that redemption is often contrived or elusive. Not so in Paul Auster's latest, The Brooklyn Follies. The narrator, Nathan Glass, a former insurance salesman, admitted lousy husband and indifferent father to his only daughter, with an iffy lung cancer prognosis, retires from his job and from life....

Auster's life-affirming odyssey

Meet Nathan Glass. He is eager to tell you all about himself. But to hear Nathan tell it, he is at least at the outset of this superbly comic novel a cynical 59-year-old man who has returned to Brooklyn for only one reason: he is quietly waiting to drop dead. As if Nathan's outlook isn't morbid enough, he seems eager to whip his poor rotten soul like some medieval penitent as he blames...

Where there's smoke

As the narrator in Paul Auster's <B>Auggie Wren's Christmas Story</B> remarks, "How could anyone propose to write an unsentimental Christmas story?" Auster though, does manage it and this slip of a book is by far one of the best offerings this holiday season. First appearing on the New York Times Op-Ed page on Christmas Day, 1990, and then five years later as the feature...